��Ruins of Humanity is the third album from the Russian one-man band Geriht, a project that successfully evokes intense feelings of isolation and dislocation through his murky outsider black metal. Never heard the band before picking up this album, but after doing so, I ended up really digging the murky, dissonant weirdness that Geriht produces, a weirdly robotic form of black metal with a heavy surrealistic streak running through it, as well as a serious experimental side to his music. "Prolog" begins the album with layered acoustic guitars woven into dark tremolo riffs, these black metal-style melodies buzzing through the etheric darkness; the feel of this first track is vaguely similar to some particularly bleak strain of 70's space music, the harmonic qualities of the acoustic strings taking on an almost synth-like feel. On the following tracks like "Drifting Failure" and "Trauma (Part I) ", though, Geriht's sound shifts fully into bleary, dissonant black metal, the warbling chords and sickly minor key melodies that spin off of the guitars becoming layered over a simple, almost ritualistic bass-drum that pounds relentlessly and hypnotically in the background. After awhile, I started to pick up a strong resemblance to Xasthur's surrealistic sound, but the vocals (when they appear, most of this is instrumental) are a bizarre monotone croak that echoes far off in the background, totally incomprehensible and inhuman, a droning, decrepit moan that at times seems to be emanating from a pipe set into the floor of the recording space, a troglodyte groan lost beneath the slow, hypnotic pulse of the drums and the soft shimmering glow of the guitars. Elsewhere, that funereal plod gets traded in for some weirdly monotonous drum machine patterns, sometimes surging into rumbling quasi-blastbeats, and the songs begin to fade off and start back up with little warning; there's also a couple of beautifully murky and warped ambient driftscapes, wheezing orchestral melodies lazily tumbling through the blackness, like funeral requiems slowed down to 16 rpm and bathed in reverb, suggesting the sound of some ancient chamber ensemble playing for a funeral in the midst of a rainstorm, their mournful strains gradually winding down, muffled by the cruel downpour. Some of the other tracks on Ruins Of Humanity offer more of that bleak, washed-out kosmische crypt ambience, revealing a distressed feel as bits of electronic crackle and speaker grit bleed through, and the nearly ten minute "Hateful Agony" gets even more abstract, the guitars smeared into a black blur of atonal noise and distant wailing feedback as strange scraping sounds flit through the foreground, the vocals reduced to an even more primordial belch while those rumbling programmed drums offer the only hint of structure to the rapidly decomposing black metal. There's a lot of that stuff on this album, the sound frequently entering into a strange trance-like state, that slowly plodding percussion pounding away beneath simple, mesmeric loops of swirling kosmische drone, tracks like "Drowning Energy" becoming a kind of blackened hypno-rock even as the double bass furiously kicks in, and in those moments sounding strangely like some frostbitten version of latter-day Skullflower. In spite of the noisiness and blown-out sound of these songs though, this is often desolate, dreamlike music, with a similar weird atmosphere as some of Striborg's stuff, or like that aforementioned industrialized take on Xasthur's bleary isolationist black metal.